NARRATOR: Every day more than four million people fly on
commercial airlines worldwide—each year, 1.7 billion people on 25 million
flights. Flying is the safest means of public transportation. Accidents are
rare, but when they happen they can be catastrophic. That was the case on
September 2, 1998. Swissair Flight 111 flying from New York to Geneva slammed
into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Nova Scotia with 229 people aboard.
Upon impact, the plane was shattered into millions of pieces and spread across
the bottom of the sea.

NANCY WIGHT (Mother of Rowenna Lee Wight White): I had hoped to get my
child's body and bring her home to New York. Well, the medical examiner just
said no one would be allowed to go to the morgue because, um...he was very
frank with us...he was very honest and he said, um, there are just parts of
people. I had a funeral with no body.

NARRATOR: Based on one clue, the pilot's radio transmission of
smoke in the cockpit, the Canadian Transportation Safety Board launches what
would become a four and a half year, $39 million investigation.

PETER GOELZ (Former Managing Director, N.T.S.B.): This was the largest
and most public accident that the Canadian Safety Board had investigated. They
were under an enormous microscope from the very start.

NARRATOR: They were faced with the question, "How could smoke
in the cockpit lead to the crash of such a massive plane?"

DAVID EVANS (Editor-In-Chief, Air Safety Week): The legacy
of this accident is enormous, because we have airplanes diverting and making
unscheduled landings at the rate of about one a day, worldwide, for in-flight
smoke events. If the cabin of a modern jetliner was a restaurant, it would not
get an occupancy permit.

NARRATOR: Was Swissair 111 an accident waiting to
happen?

MILES GERETY (Swissair Flight 111 Family Group): Some of the
families had trouble believing that their loved ones had died. And I said, just
show them some pieces of the wreckage, not a lot, not all of it, but just some,
and they'll realize that nobody could survive the crash.

NARRATOR: Can another Swissair 111 be prevented? Crash of
Flight 111, right now, on NOVA.

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NARRATOR: On the evening of September 2nd, 1998, Swissair
Flight 111 taxis for takeoff from New York's J.F.K. airport. The plane is an
MD-11, a jumbo jet, built just seven years earlier by McDonnell Douglas. At
8:18 p.m., Eastern Time, Flight 111 takes off, bound for Geneva with 229 people
aboard.

Then, about an hour after takeoff, a wisp of smoke enters the
cockpit.

MARK CLITSOME (Operations Group Chair, Transportation Safety Board of
Canada): The first officer noticed an odor, mentioned it to the captain and,
uh, the captain said look. The first officer said that he'd get up and take a
look at it. And he looked around, and he couldn't see anything. There was
nothing more out there. And the captain then called the flight attendant from
the first class section to come forward and asked her if she had seen any smoke
or smelled anything, and she said there was nothing in the first class section
where she was working.

NARRATOR: The pilots dismiss it as a common air conditioning
problem. Then, two minutes later, at 9:14, air traffic control receives a
transmission from Swissair 111 declaring "Pan, Pan, Pan"—the
international urgency call, indicating trouble but not a threat to life.

But as the pilot requests a place to land, his transmission is audibly
obscured by an oxygen mask. Already 300 miles past Boston's Logan Airport, air
traffic control radios back suggesting Halifax Airport, only 60 miles away. The
pilot accepts, and Swissair 111 is passed over to the Halifax air traffic
controller.

Runway 06 is readied for an emergency landing.

MARK CLITSOME: The air traffic controller notified them that they were
30 nautical miles to the runway. However, they were still not ready, at that
altitude, to land, so they had to lose some more altitude. Then the pilots also
mentioned to the air traffic controller that they needed to dump some fuel, and
so the controller turned them back towards the ocean to do that.

NARRATOR: As the plane heads towards the Atlantic Ocean,
Swissair 111 radios again to Halifax. A warbling sound in the background
indicates that the autopilot is disconnected. Both pilots declare emergency.
It's 9:25.

For the next six minutes there is no further communication. Then, at 9:31,
Eastern Time, Swissair Flight 111, with 229 people aboard, slams into the cold
dark waters off Nova Scotia.

Rescue workers are on the scene within minutes. A furious search through
the night reveals the tragic fact there are no survivors.

MILES GERETY: Going up there was a compulsion. I wanted to know where my
brother died. That's all I wanted to know. I wanted to be at the place, as near
to the place as we could be.

NARRATOR: Miles Gerety lost his brother Pierce and became
president of the International Association of the Families of Swissair Flight
111, representing the concerns of those who lost loved ones.

One major concern is to make sure the mystery of the crash is solved.

MILES GERETY: The plane had hit the water so fast, and we knew how many
parts it was in, uh, and how just totally destroyed the bodies were, that I
always thought there was a good possibility they might not be able to solve it.
But it was really important, actually, for me and for everybody else. You
really do want to know what caused a loved one's death.

NARRATOR: Peter Goelz was managing director of the National
Transportation Safety Board, an agency representing the United States in the
investigation.

PETER GOELZ: The stakes are enormous in an investigation like this.
First, you have the families of the 229 passengers. They need to know that the
investigation is unbiased, that it's done quickly, that it's done fairly, and
that it's done in a transparent way. Then you have the public at large, who
flies on aircraft every day, every week. They need to know that this
investigation is going to uncover any fundamental flaws in the system or in the
aircraft, so that this accident doesn't happen again.

NARRATOR: Because the crash is in Canadian waters, Canada's
Transportation Safety Board conducts the investigation, with help from their
counterparts in the United States and Switzerland.

They'll be joined by representatives of the airline industry and
manufacturers including Boeing, which took over McDonnell Douglas, and Pratt
& Whitney, the engine maker. Watching carefully are claims adjusters from
insurance companies, members of the press, and all those who lost someone in
the crash.

The first clue in the investigation is the pilot's report of smoke in the
cockpit. And now, burn marks on floating debris and on some pieces of the
recovered plane, indicate fire. But what caused the fire? Equipment
malfunction? Terrorism?

The answer lies 180 feet below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean. After
four days of combing the ocean floor, investigators get a break. A diver
recovers the Flight Data Recorder and five days later, the Cockpit Voice
Recorder, the plane's "black boxes."

By cross-referencing the aircraft's performance data with the voice
recorder, crash detectives should be able to tell what happened after the
pilots lost contact with air traffic control.

Members of Canada's Transportation Safety Board rush the boxes to the lab
for analysis. But, in a highly unusual occurrence, right after the pilots
declared emergency, the recorders stopped working. Nearly all information about
the last six minutes of Flight 111 is lost. It's a profound setback.

Now, to find out what caused the crash of Swissair 111, investigators will
need to reconstruct the final six minutes of its flight. To do that, they need
to salvage clues from the hundreds of thousands of pounds of wreckage lying
over 180 feet below on the ocean floor. It's a Herculean task.

With winter threatening, the salvage operation goes into high gear,
involving more than 4,000 people from Canada and the U.S. Scallop trawlers and
heavy lift ships comb a scattered debris field. Everything is a potential clue:
tangled webs of wire, fragments of aluminum, plastic, cloth and wreckage from
the cabin.

DON ENNS (Senior Technical Investigator, Transportation Safety Board of
Canada): The amount of energy that it took to destroy this airplane into
pieces that we can pick up in one hand and have no trouble manipulating, all of
that in, you know, I don't know, a third of a second or less? It's just...it's
mind-boggling.

NARRATOR: Somewhere in these millions of mangled pieces lies
the answer to what caused the crash. Investigators will need to piece together
the plane to solve the mystery.

The clues they already have, smoke in the cockpit and burnt debris, point
to fire. But where did the smoke come from? And what caused the fire?

David Evans is Editor-in-Chief of Air Safety Week, and covered the
investigation from the beginning.

DAVID EVANS: Well, in the horribly grim circumstances of this tragedy,
the one footnote of good news is that the airplane plunged into the water,
which had the effect of immediately dousing the fire and freezing in time the
evidence that would be so crucial to unraveling the mystery.

DON ENNS: All of the fire damage that we see is pre-impact damage. There
is no post-crash fire to destroy that evidence.

NARRATOR: The fire burned a kind of color code on each piece
of debris, based on heat intensity, how close and how long it was exposed to
fire. If investigators can break the code, it will assist them in
reconstructing the plane and locating the source of the fire.

DON ENNS: So what we did is, we got Boeing to provide us some samples of
the actual primer, and we painted these coupons and subjected them to these
different heats for different periods of time to see what the color change was.

NARRATOR: As investigators increased the temperature and time
of exposure to heat, the samples go from a light green to a dark brown.

DON ENNS: What this is giving us is an ability to measure the
temperature in different areas of the airplane.

NARRATOR: The hottest temperatures, in excess of 1,000
degrees, are in the front of the plane. In all, there are about two million
pieces bent, torn, and burnt.

BILL DICKERSON (Department of National Defence, Canada): What you look
for are specific landmarks like this. It has a pattern on the tape, so that's
one thing you can look at. The soot damage on the inside also, you try and
match that up. Now here's a possible, a little piece missing out of here. But
I've got, quite possibly, a good match, and...I'm going to call that a
match.

NARRATOR: As small pieces go together, forming more
identifiable parts, investigators begin to place them onto the jig, or frame of
the plane. While they are building it physically, they are also building it
virtually. From MD-11 plans furnished by Boeing, the T.S.B. constructs a 3-D
model.

LOUIS LANDRIAULT (Fire and Pathology Group, Transportation Safety Board
of Canada): This CAD model is accurate enough, we can actually go in and
take physical measurements off it. So, when they're reconstructing the jig out
there and they want to know where this piece of duct goes, we can actually go
in here and measure that out for them and then tell them, right off the
measurements, where they have to put that piece of duct.

NARRATOR: These ducts are from the front of the plane, above
the passengers' heads. They are hidden from view in the cabin ceiling. Below
them are the first class galleys, where the flight crew was heating up dinner
for passengers.

Could a fire have started here?

DON ENNS: With the electrical components and the fact that we have ovens
in two of these galleys, it's definitely a potential source of fire. So we're
looking now for fire damage. There's no fire damage inside the galleys. When
we, when we get down to this point, the outside of this door, we can see that
it has in fact been subjected to heat up here. And, in fact, the plastic on the
outside wall here is starting to melt and come down; the same when we get over
to the roof of this galley; the same with the heat damage on the roof of Galley
1. All of this is from the top down, as opposed to from the bottom up. So our
ovens did not play a factor in creating this damage. And that becomes extremely
significant, because now we rule out a whole bunch of things.

NARRATOR: What they can rule out is a bomb, explosion, or fire
in the cargo hold, passenger compartment, or anywhere in the lower half of the
plane. So the source of the fire must be from above, somewhere in the ceiling.
Then a clue points to the cockpit.

MIKE MATHIEU (Structures Specialist, Transportation Safety Board of
Canada): This is our co-pilot seat and our carpets. All we got were just
various pieces here...just came in from the sea.

MIKE MATHIEU: Okay, if we could figure out exactly where in the cockpit
these particular melt spots are located, we could figure out under which part
of the ceiling they were, and that would help us identify which part of the
ceiling was hot.

NARRATOR: Melt marks from above the pilots' heads, burned
ducts in the hidden attic area, a charred galley roof, heat tests showing
higher temperatures in the front of the plane, and not a single piece of burned
wreckage in the middle or rear of the aircraft—armed with this evidence,
the T.S.B. concentrates the investigation on the cockpit and forward section of
the plane and, in particular, the hidden attic area.

A chief suspect in any fire that begins above is wire—150 miles of
it.

JIM FOOT (Systems Group Chair, Transportation Safety Board of Canada.):
Well, through all the wire that we've looked at, we've managed to come across
or find fourteen wires that show melt damage. Like we have a copper wire here,
the end of it is actually melted. And, typically, this would be indicative of
an electrical arcing activity.

NARRATOR: Electrical arcing is basically a massive short
circuit, a potentially lethal event.

ARMIN BRUNING (President, Lectromechanical Design Company): This
system delivers power, through the wires, to this bundle, which represents the
wire distribution system on an active aircraft.

NARRATOR: Armin Bruning has spent his career investigating
aircraft wiring and was asked to provide expert testimony on electrical arcing
to Congress during the Swissair investigation. His arcing test simulates
conditions aboard planes like the MD-11.

One condition he finds on every plane is cracks in the insulation on the
wires. It's caused by the vibration of flight, chafing, physical contact during
maintenance, or just degradation over time.

But electrical current from this bared wire can jump to a metal piece of
the plane or another wire with damaged insulation. Often, the only condition
necessary is normal atmospheric condensation, which naturally occurs in the
attic area of the plane during flight. Here, condensation is simulated with a
drop of water.

Depending upon age, experts estimate there are between 400 and 1,500 cracks
per airplane—each a potential cause of catastrophic arcing.

ARMIN BRUNING: Arcing is just like lightning. It is, in fact, in the
range of 12,000 degrees Fahrenheit, as compared to typical flame
temperatures—800 degrees Fahrenheit, 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. In other
words, it's 10 times hotter.

NARRATOR: Clearly arcing can cause fire. But fire can also
cause arcing. These wires could have arced when the fire was already raging. Is
the heat damage on these wires the cause or result of the fire that
investigators are increasingly convinced brought down Swissair 111?

DAVID EVANS: At the one-year anniversary, the bulk of the wreckage was
recovered. The notion of an electrically-sparked fire on the airplane was
pretty well established. The investigators were now facing a major effort to
recreate the circumstances surrounding the fire—how it got started, how
it took root, how it was able to ultimately bring this airplane down.

MALE (Reader at Memorial Service): We come to reflect on the tragic loss
suffered by so many of the families who are here today.

LARRY VANCE (Deputy Investigator-In-Charge, Transportation Safety Board
of Canada): I remember I was with Helene, doing a visit with a family
from France, I believe. They spoke French. And it was over in J Hangar with a
little guy. He was three-years old, and he was all over the place. And we did
the standard tour with some English and some translation. And at the end of
that, I always make sure that I ask, "Is there anything else that you want to
know?" And the little guy, by this time, was in with Helene, and I got it
through interpretation, but that didn't take any of the emotion out of it. He
asked, "Is this daddy's airplane?" And Helene was translating for me, and she
said, "Yes." And he said, "Why is it in so many pieces?" And I said to Helene,
"Just tell him that's what we're here trying to figure out." And that just
about blew me away. I'll remember that one a long time, forever.

NARRATOR: More than a year after the crash, T.S.B.
investigators return to where Swissair 111 hit the ocean. They're still missing
parts of the plane, wires, electrical components, pieces of the cockpit. In
hopes of finding whatever is left on the ocean floor, they rent the world's
largest vacuum cleaner.

LARGE-BOAT CAPTAIN: There's no problem.

NARRATOR: The ship, called Queen of the Netherlands, arrives at the
crash site. It rents for about $130,000 a day, and all it will take is one
day.

A metal pipe is lowered into the water, on the end, a head that can run
along the seabed, sucking up whatever's there. Everything is drawn into a large
holding area.

A two-hour drive east of Halifax is Sheet Harbor. There, the T.S.B. has
constructed a three and a half-acre dike. The mud and rock and aircraft parts
sucked into the ship's hold are pumped into the dike.

JOHN GARSTANG (Fire Group Chair, Transportation Safety Board of
Canada): The good news is a lot of the stuff we're looking at has got
part numbers on it.

NARRATOR: They hire a team of locals to sift through the
debris. Anything that's not part of the bottom of the sea is kept, no matter
how small. It's all brought back to Halifax.

DON ENNS: These are things that are of no consequence to the
investigation so we're putting them into this box here, which is our never-to-
be-looked-at-again box.

LARRY VANCE: Here we are, some 15 months and three days after the
accident happened, and the last of the wreckage is finally being sorted out.

NARRATOR: Now, with 98 percent of the aircraft, by weight,
recovered, new evidence is getting scarce, and they still don't know the source
of the fire.

They take a different approach. Swissair provides an MD-11 which
investigators retrofit for a smoke and air-flow test. If they can see how smoke
circulates in the plane, perhaps they can follow it back to the origin of the
fire.

DAVID EVANS: Well, clearly investigators were focusing on the source of
the smoke, because where there's smoke there's fire. And they clearly had an
uncontrolled, uncontained, runaway fire on this airplane.

NARRATOR: From the cockpit voice recorder, the T.S.B. knows
that the pilots smelled smoke, and then it went away. They also know that no
one in the passenger cabin detected any.

Investigators equip the aircraft with smoke generators, video cameras in
hidden attic areas, and measuring equipment. They introduce wisps of smoke into
the cockpit and cabin and measure the speed and direction of the flow.

The results are integrated into a computer model built by the T.S.B. The
arrows track the flow of air throughout the plane. This dense cluster of arrows
above the cabin ceiling is next to the recirculation fans. Here, the smoke is
filtered out and clean air is recirculated back into the cabin.

But because the recirculation fans are doing their job, there can be smoke
in the attic of the cabin without passengers smelling it. And worse, fire can
be raging above without anybody knowing.

Combining the air-flow test with the reconstruction of the wreckage, the
investigators pinpoint the origin of the fire to a two square-foot area above
the cockpit.

But, how did it start and what fueled it?

Since the early recovery phases, investigators have noted a strange sight,
burn marks on the plane's insulation blankets. The shiny silver covering of
this insulation is commonly known as metallized Mylar® or MPET.
To keep the interior warm and quiet, the plane is stuffed with MPET-covered
insulation.

In October 2000, the Canadian investigators take samples of the same type
of insulation that was in Swissair 111 to the Federal Aviation Administration's
testing facility in Atlantic City. The F.A.A. establishes the basis for
international standards of aircraft safety.

PETER GOELZ: The F.A.A. has a very sophisticated division that handles
the certification of aircraft and the equipment that goes into an aircraft.
They, along with the original equipment manufacturers, have a procedure in
which all of these parts are tested and certified and approved.

NARRATOR: Years before, MPET was tested for flammability and
certified by the F.A.A.

NARRATOR: But, within seconds, it fails the test. Clearly this
FAA-certified material is fuel for fire.

PATRICIA CAHILL: This is obviously a failure. It has failed flame
propagation, obviously, after flame time.

NARRATOR: The original flammability test was designed in 1972.
Since then, the F.A.A. has come up with this new test they're using
today.

PATRICIA CAHILL: This is a much more stringent test than the 12-second
vertical test which was required by the F.A.A., and most of the time, this
material passed that test.

NARRATOR: The new test for newly-built airplanes would be
mandated on September 2, 2003, five years to the day after the crash of
Swissair 111. But of the 6,000 commercial jets currently flying in the U.S.
fleet, more than half have insulation coverings that fail the new test.

PETER GOELZ: I think, quite clearly there was an oversight that the
testing procedures were not adequate to reveal the danger from this metallized
Mylar. And it took a tragedy such as Swissair 111 to highlight that more needed
to be done in this area.

NARRATOR: They also test the end caps of the airplane's
ventilation system, another material that according to F.A.A. standards, should
not burn. Behind these end caps are the ducts that carry Flight 111's air
supply.

JOHN GARSTANG: This is...one of the things we're investigating here is
this portion of duct. There's actually a silicon end cap that covers this piece
here, and if this silicon end cap burns off during the fire sequence we may get
fresh air delivery into this general area.

NARRATOR: Introducing fresh air could fan the flames of a
growing fire.

PATRICIA CAHILL: That's really interesting. Oh, yes. Jeez. Look at it. I
have never seen a material do that. Look at that.

LARRY VANCE: I think it was a surprise to a number of people and not
just our team. I think that, uh, it certainly was a surprise to me. I had no
idea that it would burn like that. I never even thought about it. And I think
that most of the other pilots in this world would be in the same boat.

DAVID EVANS: I was thinking at, at the time, "Well, these things are
flying fire traps. I mean, how is it that we can put 200-plus people in an
airplane with all of this flammable material? You know, this is the tinder
waiting for the match."

FEMALE (REPORTER AT T.S.B. PRESS CONFERENCE):Mr. Gerden, I'm just interested in clarification on your first
recommendation in relation to this crash.

NARRATOR: The T.S.B. doesn't wait to publish its final report
before releasing its findings.

NARRATOR: The investigators have clearly identified the
flammable material that fueled the fire. They make recommendations they believe
will prevent a disaster like this from ever occurring again—foremost, a
call to remove MPET-covered insulation from all aircraft.

NARRATOR: The investigators now have the tinder, but where is
the match? They travel to Switzerland to take advantage of an MD-11 that's
being pulled apart for a 30,000 hour tune-up.

Swissair is removing all the flammable insulation blankets and replacing
them with more fire resistant material. This is a chance for investigators to
dig beneath them.

JIM FOOT: It's an opportunity for us to get a closer look at the wiring.
There's a lot up here.

NARRATOR: A defect in electrical wiring is still the main
suspect for the origin of the fire. The investigators are well aware of the
lethal power of arcing. And now, armed with the fact that the material in close
proximity to the wiring is flammable, they're even more suspicious.

But how do you find one lethal arc out of 150 miles of mangled and burnt
wires?

They return to Canada to search once again, physically and
virtually.

JOHN GARSTANG: Why this is a very handy tool is it allows us to, in
effect, bring the aircraft here in the hanger. I can look at different areas in
the aircraft and what we're looking at now is, uh, just what it would look
like...as if I popped my head up above the ceiling. And you can see that when
you visit the jig, we don't have too many pieces up there, but, in the actual
aircraft, there's lots of wires present. These are the entertainment wires.

NARRATOR: The entertainment wires power the In-Flight
Entertainment Network or I.F.E.N. for short. They are suspicious of the
entertainment system because many of the arcs they found are on I.F.E.N. wires.
If they can pinpoint one of those arcs to the location where they know the fire
started, they'll know what sparked the flames.

They've got the fuel for the fire. They know how it spread. All they need
now is the source.

LARRY VANCE: And if it hadn't been an I.F.E.N. wire that was the lead
event in the sequence, then how would those wires still be powered?

NARRATOR: Unfortunately, none of the arcs can be linked to the
two-square-foot area where they believe the fire began.

LARRY VANCE: It's not possible.

NARRATOR: It could be the end of the line. After three long
years, the T.S.B. investigators resign themselves to the fact that they, and
family members of those who lost their lives on Swissair 111, will never know
the actual origin of the fire.

Then, six months into writing their final report, investigator Jim Foot
sees something that had eluded them.

JIM FOOT: I remember quite well. It was on a Sunday...working in here in
the morning, at this microscope, doing the documentation, and there it was. I
mean, as I was pulling this apart, doing the final documentation on the wire, I
found it.

NARRATOR: What he found was an arc on an I.F.E.N. wire that
had not been seen before. Could this newly found arc be the ignition point of
the fire? They go back to the hangar with a list of all the brackets they've
recovered. Brackets hold wires and they are hoping to find the one bracket that
held the arced wire.

JOHN GARSTANG: We're searching, right now, to see if we can find one
that may have a potential mark on it associated with our initiating event.

NARRATOR: The initiating event, or arc, probably left some
damage on the metal bracket, something resembling a nick or notch carved out by
a powerful surge of electricity.

JOHN GARSTANG: We don't know if it's there or not. That's why we're
going back through the brackets again.

MALE (TSB Investigator): Looking in the interior, non-identified,
there's a lot of those.

JOHN GARSTANG: Okay, we have 93-92, 93-97.

DON ENNS: This is one of those never-to-be-gone-through-again-boxes, so
we're going through it again.

JOHN GARSTANG: There it is: nine-three-nine-seven, right there.

DON ENNS: Yeah, right back...why didn't we pick it up?

DON ENNS: Is there still one more in here?

JOHN GARSTANG: Yeah, 93-92; one to go.

DON ENNS: Hey, what's the number you're looking for?

JOHN GARSTANG: Ninety-three, ninety-two. That's it. It was on the floor?

NARRATOR: They find every bracket on their list.

JOHN GARSTANG: We're complete.

NARRATOR: But none of them show damage from arcing. They do
have one other possibility for tracing the arced wire to a specific location in
the plane.

They go back to all the wires in the suspect area and line them up
according to the pattern of fire damage.

JOHN GARSTANG: In theory, if this is right, we should have a hot spot
near 401 and the same thing on 410.

NARRATOR: Now, they hope to see whether the I.F.E.N. wire with
the newly found arc fits the pattern.

JOHN GARSTANG: Well look at that. This, this is hot. There it is. It's
right there. So, that matches.

NARRATOR: After three and a half years, 280,000 pounds of
wreckage, 150 miles of wire, they've tracked the origin of the fire down to
within a few inches and a specific split-second 12,000 degree electrical flash.

Armed with every piece of the puzzle, the disaster detectives still need to
answer one remaining question, "How did the fire cause the crash?" The answer
is hidden in the six minutes that were missing from the black boxes. Piloting a
Transport Canada jet, the T.S.B. investigators decide to retrace the final
minutes of Swissair 111's last flight.

MARK CLITSOME: The first coordinate we're going to...and we'd like to
descend from 33...and we'd like to descend down to 10,000.

NARRATOR: It was here, at 33,000 feet, at about 9:08 p.m.,
Eastern Time, 50 minutes into the flight, when the fatal arc must have
occurred. Immediately, the MPET-covered insulation ignites.

Fed by these flammable insulation blankets, the fire quickly grows and
spreads unseen in the attic area. At 9:10, the pilot detects the tiny wisp of
smoke.

DAVID EVANS: This is part of the seductive nature of in-flight smoke and
fire: it may manifest, it may disappear. It's doing its thing out of sight. And
that fire may be taking root as you try and locate the source of the smoke.
You're dealing with this seductive demon. It's going to appear, disappear, come
back.

NARRATOR: Investigators now know the smoke is sucked away by
the recirculation fans, but some smoke does reenter the cockpit. It's 9:14.
That's when the co-pilot radios air traffic control that they need to land the
plane. Halifax Airport prepares for an emergency landing.

MARK CLITSOME: If these pilots knew that there was a fire going on, they
would have immediately headed for the airport and done whatever they could to
get that aircraft on the ground.

NARRATOR: But without smoke and fire detectors, which are not
required in the attic areas of airplanes, the co-pilot turns out to sea to lose
altitude and dump 30 tons of fuel for a safer approach and landing. Meanwhile
the pilot continues to search for the source of the smoke. He turns off all
non-essential power to the cabin, but this shuts off the recirculation fans,
and the fire surges forward.

JOHN GARSTANG: Now the smoke and combustion byproducts would be drawn
forward into the cockpit and would basically flow into the attic air space
above the cockpit. The only thing now protecting the crew is the cockpit
ceiling.

NARRATOR: The fire, still hidden from the pilots, burns
through wires and disables the autopilot. The plastic ceiling liner begins to
drip.

JOHN GARSTANG: And when it melts, and the fire gases come through, it
would be obvious to the crew that the situation has significantly gotten worse.
And it would be quite perilous.

NARRATOR: The last barrier between the pilots and the raging
fire gives way. The pilot and co-pilot simultaneously declare an
emergency.

Ken Adams is a former MD-11 pilot and represented the Air Line Pilots
Association during the investigation.

KEN ADAMS (Air Line Pilots Association): All of a sudden, you
could hear in their voices the panic as they declared the emergency, they
needed to land now. You could hear the autopilot siren in the background just
going off continuously.

NARRATOR: As the fire rages and the cockpit fills with smoke,
conditions deteriorate rapidly. For the next 50 seconds the pilots can still
control the plane with the primary flight instruments. Then the Flight Data
Recorder, seconds before losing power, reveals a frightening event. These
crucial screens go dark. The pilots are forced to fly with only small,
poorly-lit backup dials.

MARK CLITSOME: It's not an easy combination to fly. Most pilots are used
to flying with normal instruments right in front of them. The standby
instruments are a lot smaller than the pilots are used to flying with, so you
require a lot of concentration.

NARRATOR: But by now smoke, fire and soot are obscuring even
the standby instruments. The only way the pilots can save the plane is to fly
it by sight alone. It is 9:25 p.m. This is when the fire burns through the
wires to the black boxes, disabling them. These are the last six minutes of
Swissair 111.

MARK CLITSOME: Okay, we're just now crossing the point at which they
declared the emergency, now descending out of 10,000 and the last known radar
point; black ahead.

NARRATOR: As their jet continues along the same flight path as
Swissair 111, one thing becomes painfully clear.

MARK CLITSOME: As we got over towards the sea it was black and
horizonless. That's what we call, in aviation, a "black hole" effect. If you're
not flying by instruments, and you're flying by using outside visual
references, it's very difficult to discern up from down and left from right.

KEN ADAMS: The captain's seat was found in the retracted position so we
have a pretty good indication that he was not in his seat. Which means, to me,
he was actually up fighting the fire. He was probably using a fire
extinguisher, but if he didn't have any protection from the toxic gases then he
may have been disabled.

Now we know that the first officer, who sits here on the right-hand side of
the airplane, was flying the airplane. He couldn't really look out front
because he had a lot of very heavy backlighting—from the fire that was in
the cockpit—and smoke. It was very dark. He didn't have any horizon. For
him to be able to see at all, he probably would have put his head against this
side window, and that would allow him actually to displace the smoke, and he
could look out.

NARRATOR: Although it may never be known for certain, Ken
Adams speculates that leaning to the right may have caused the co-pilot to
gradually bank the plane to the right. Desperately searching for Halifax
airport, fire raging in a smoke- and fume-filled cockpit, black sky above and
black sea below, he may have unwittingly rolled the plane over onto its
side.

KEN ADAMS: The airplane tightened up and rolled over and impacted into
the water.

NARRATOR: It's doubtful that anyone saw the ocean approaching
as Swissair 111 slammed into the sea.

KEN ADAMS: Humans were just not built as strong as aluminum. For the
people in the airplane, they would be starting to come apart just as the
airplane was starting to come apart.

NARRATOR: The investigation into the crash of Swissair 111 was
one of the most thorough in aviation history. But after four and a half years,
a $39 million investigation, an insurance settlement of $1.5 billion—an
average of $6.5 million for each of the 229 lost lives—what is the legacy
of Swissair 111?

DAVID EVANS: Freud said crystals reveal their hidden structure when
broken. And that's why accident investigations are so important: that we do
them thoroughly, and we do them properly, that we take our time. We are
presented with a fractured crystal. We have a window into the internal
structure of design, checks and balances, protection, and safety.

NARRATOR: The Canadian Transportation Safety Board made 23
recommendations. These include: installing smoke detectors and video cameras to
reveal hidden fires before they spread; streamlining the pilots' smoke
checklist and implementing a fire-fighting plan for pilots and crew; increasing
the size and visibility of standby instruments; providing black boxes with
backup power supplies and increasing the recording time of the Cockpit Voice
Recorder; inspecting aircraft wiring and setting a higher standard to prevent
arcing; and, perhaps most important, new flammability standards and the removal
of MPET covered insulation and all flammable materials throughout the
aircraft.

But safety investigators make recommendations; only civil aviation
authorities, like the F.A.A., can turn them into regulations. Few of the
Canadian T.S.B.'s recommendations have been fully implemented. For example, the
F.A.A. gave the airlines four years to remove flammable MPET insulation. And
then, at the airlines' request, extended the deadline by a year, until June
2005.

DAVID EVANS: Now what do we have in the airline industry? We have what I
would call a confederacy of complacency. The problem is that the hazard
continues to this day.

NARRATOR: MPET, the material that fueled Flight 111's deadly
fire, remains in many McDonnell Douglas airplanes. But the problem goes beyond
MPET. Other brands of flammable insulation coverings are in thousands of other
planes, the majority of the U.S. commercial fleet: AN-26 Mylar in Boeing jets,
foam insulation in Airbus, to name a few. The F.A.A. has not set a deadline for
their removal.

Another disturbing fact: the airline industry and the F.A.A. knew MPET was
flammable years before Swissair 111. In 1993, an MD-87 jet was engulfed in
flames while taxiing on a runway in Denmark. Then, in 1995, an MD-11 in China
caught fire. Both fires were fueled by the same type of insulation blankets
that were on Swissair 111.

DAVID EVANS: There had been a number of accidents involving burned
insulation blankets on U.S.-built aircraft flown in China. And the Chinese
authorities had contacted our Federal Aviation Administration and advised them
that, "Guys, you may have a flammability problem here." Action taken? None.

NARRATOR: In both these major airplane fires, everyone escaped
with their lives, a case study in what some call the industry's "tombstone
mentality": the tendency to ignore a safety problem until lives are lost. But
now lives have been lost—the lives of 229 people aboard Swissair
111—and still the T.S.B.'s call for an integrated fire-fighting
philosophy is being ignored.

MILES GERETY: What the Canadians figured out is, hey, wires can be a
problem. You ought to make the environment around them so it is at least fire
resistant. And you ought to have things like the smoke detector that I have in
this house, to let people know, hey, there's a fire going on inside the walls
of that plane.

KEN ADAMS: We're presently having new airplanes designed, they're on the
drawing board. Boeing has one. Airbus has what they call the Airbus 380, which
is going to be a 550-passenger airplane. The regulations haven't changed. They
do not have to provide any more fire detection or fire protection than we had
on Swissair 111.

DAVID EVANS: What strikes me is that so many of these accidents, about
which I have written over the years, had precursor events that, had action been
taken, they could have been prevented. I haven't seen one yet where structure
and systems were involved, where it wasn't avoidable and preventable
beforehand. And therein lies the tragedy. Therein lies the culpability.

FEMALE (Reader at Memorial Service): As we come to dedicate this
memorial, we give thanks for the lives of those from Flight 111, who died off
these shores.